Riverside Terrace Café offers its version of a classic — stuffed, butterflied shrimp with a fine-crumb coating and a deviled-crab mixture inside.

Riverside Terrace Café offers its version of a classic — stuffed, butterflied shrimp with a fine-crumb coating and a deviled-crab mixture inside.

Photo: Melissa Phillip, Chronicle

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The restaurant's sweetly genteel dining room.

The restaurant's sweetly genteel dining room.

Photo: Melissa Phillip, Chronicle

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Grilled Catfish Cancun.

Grilled Catfish Cancun.

Photo: Melissa Phillip, Chronicle

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Riverside Terrace Cafe adept at cuisine and ambience

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Sitting among the boxwood and clipped ligustrum of the Riverside Terrace Café on a sunny evening, the workaday world of Houston seemed very far away.

From an ironwork cafe table on a mosaic-stone terrace, you could watch a nimble squirrel scale a towering palm. Birds sang in the greenery. A bicyclist pedaled down the quiet street, which was lined with grand old mid-century mansions — some buffed up, some gently faded.

That table, and that terrace, felt as if they were lost in their own dreamy universe. The restaurant's sweetly genteel dining room evokes the same feeling, as panels of stained and leaded glass catch the light, and a rustic, coffered ceiling of stained-and-stenciled wood creates a unique environment.

The Riverside's food bears its own special stamp. There is something homey and genuine about the slate of upscale Creole-Southern specialties, from irresistible twice-baked potatoes to habit-forming gumbo and old-school peach cobbler.

It tastes like food you might get at the dinner party of a talented home cook. In this era of creeping restaurant sameness, that's a compliment.

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Take that twice-baked potato, a simple buttered and cheese-laced comfort that might have been produced by a doting mom. After a couple of bites, you start wondering how soon you can return to eat another one.

The seafood gumbo? Same deal. Its low-key warmth blossoms on the palate, and its soupy broth — not the product of a heavy-duty roux, but purely savory and delicious — does right by its cargo of pearly little shrimp, cooked just so.

Seafood in a classic Gulf Coast mode is a specialty here. Stuffed, butterflied shrimp, fried in a fine-crumb coating and packed with an old-fashioned deviled crab mixture, tasted like a welcome blast from the past. There was just enough red-peppery warmth to animate the dish.

The accompanying raft of discreetly steamed vegetables — squash, broccoli, cauliflower — made the whole plate seem plausibly healthy (oh, OK, less guilt-inducing). The vegetables are included with many of the Riverside's entrees, but the portion size varies erratically, and they could lose the industrial baby carrots, which seem to have been turned on a lathe.

Even better than the stuffed shrimp, and some lively cornmeal-crusted fried oysters, was a meticulously grilled catfish fillet with pico de gallo. Listed on the menu as Catfish Cancun, the dish is a modern classic, and its $10.95 tab — with vegetables and a twice-baked potato — makes it one of the city's better bargains.

Lagniappe with all of the above is the Riverside's garlic bread, cut long and barely gilded with cheese — yummy, delightfully unfashionable stuff.

Trends have found their way here, as they do to the ambitious family table. There is a startlingly good appetizer called "St. Kitts Jerk Chicken Rolls," crisp and crackly of skin, and served with a racy hot-tart papaya salsa that the restaurant could sell by the pint. Failing that, I wish they would pair it with an entree or two. It is that exciting.

The house jambalaya, which comes on more like a tomatoey shrimp-and-sausage Creole, can be had over fettucine instead of rice. Maybe it's not as "highly seasoned and spicy" as the menu suggests, but it is winning in its own modest way, and the sausage is lively.

I was far less taken with an Angus rib-eye steak, ordered rare and served with a refrigerator-cold center. It was oversalted, too. I kicked myself for not ordering the barbecued baby back ribs instead. They were the signature dish at RJ's Rib Joint, the establishment that inhabited the space before current proprietress Orgena Keener took over last fall, and RJ's chef is still in the kitchen.

The menu is an amalgam of his recipes and those of Keener and her business partner, an attorney from Mobile. That's his family gumbo.

Mostly, it's a happy marriage. An occasional dud surfaces, such as the fried crab fingers, which were on the stringy and watery side, as if they had been frozen. The rudimentary wine list is in dire need of a revamp. Until it's upgraded, beer and mixed drinks (or the unrepentantly sweetened iced tea) are better options.

I found myself wishing, too, that the Tiffany-style light fixtures hanging directly over the tables did not issue such a harsh light; such a charming room deserves better.

These problems have easy remedies, since everyone involved seems to have the crucial gift of making food taste good. Not to mention the gift of making guests feel welcome.

On every one of my visits, my guests and I got a warm welcome and solicitous care, even though the staff is small.

That seems to be because the reincarnated restaurant has not been discovered yet. At lunch, a lovely time to inhabit this space, there's a steady, small stream of professionals and TSU faculty from the surrounding neighborhood. But dinner remains underpopulated, and it deserves more attention.

With high-rise and mid-rise condos exploding along nearby Texas 288, and northward in the Third Ward, there'll likely be a growing audience for the soulful home cooking and affordable prices offered by the Riverside Terrace Café.

And if the denizens of the nearby Binz and Rice University/Medical Center areas learn to look past the artificial (and easily surmounted) barrier of Texas 288, this engaging cafe could become a valuable, low-key neighborhood hangout.

For some folks, it already is.

On my last visit, the most beautiful evening of the year, my friends and I struck up a conversation with a couple who live near the eatery. Over bowls of gumbo — and spirited discussion of the best way to make dirty rice — they confessed that they eat at the Riverside two or three times a week.